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Monday, September 30, 2013

I do drink coffee. About one cup a day, either an espresso or cappuccino
made by a barista in a café or brewed in my stove top coffee maker, or if
I'm in Chennai, filter coffee made sweet and strong with lots of decoction
added to the freshly boiled milk. What I don't do is obsess about making
coffee. All that fussing about how much roast and level of grind and then
endless arguments about the right technique which can involve buying
equipment that costs as much as a small car - when that starts I'm out of the
door to the nearest café where someone else can do all that for me.
I think my lack of patience with coffee fanatics is
also one reason why I have a sneaky fascination with filter coffee. It is,
of course, quite possible to be obsessive about making filter coffee. RK
Narayan in My Dateless Diary gave a description of his mother doing exactly
this as she "selects the right quality of seeds almost subjecting
every bean to a severe scrutiny, roasts them slowly over charcoal fire, and
knows by the texture and fragrance of the golden smoke emanating from the
chinks in the roaster whether the seeds within have turned the right shade
and then grinds them into perfect grains."
All this is could be taken from any coffee
fanatic's textbook, but it is what happens next that is heresy. Whatever
their doctrinal differences, most coffee fanatics will agree that the
ground coffee must not be mixed with other substances, that the brewing be
fast and consumption be quick, ideally unmixed with any other substance, not
even milk. But with South Indian filter coffee, despite some holdouts for
pure coffee, the standard is now for chicory to be added. The brewing is
not fast, but excruciatingly slow, as the coffee drips lazily to form the
'decoction'. And it is nearly always drunk mixed with milk.
This is what is entertaining, even valuable, about
filter coffee: by contrasting one fanatical way to make coffee with another
way that is equally fanatical, yet quite opposed, it suggests that it is
the fanaticism that is foolish. Coffee is just a good drink that can be
made in different ways and if this doesn't seem like a particularly radical
conclusion, you haven't met hard core coffee obsessives. Recently in
Chennai I even found coffee decoction being sold in plastic pouches and
while it didn't make the best cup of coffee I have ever tasted, it wasn't
that bad. I had to fight the urge to buy pouches to give my fanatic friends
just to see the looks of horror on their faces.
How can filter coffee be so different, yet good?
First, one has to understand that it is different - decoction drunk neat
does not taste like a strong espresso, but has a mellower caramel note
underlying the dominant coffee bitterness. Of course, this also depends on
how much chicory is used, since that is very bitter itself. Different
percentages are used in commercial blends and I once spent a rather nerve
jangling day trying them, from the barely perceptible 5% chicory to a
frankly undrinkable 40% chicory and concluded that 15-20% chicory gave the
most characteristic filter coffee flavour.
Harish Bijoor, who has had much experience in
consulting about and selling coffee, explains the key difference in the
brewing. "Quick extraction pulls out the oleo resins that are negative
to good coffee taste as we know in fast brew mechanisms. Slow-brew extracts
the right stuff and leaves back the undesirables." I have written in
this column about the wonders of cold brew coffee where the powder is
steeped for at least 24 hours in cold water. That is the ultimate slow
brewing, as the coffee flavour slowly dissolves out to give a very mellow
tasting coffee but one with disconcertingly no aroma.
Cold brew coffee makes one understand how much the
hot brew we are used to is about smell as much as taste, and perhaps one
should see filter coffee as an intermediate form. Because it uses hot water
- and fresh roasting if you are fanatic - you get aroma. But once it goes
into the standard two cylinder coffee filter everything slows down. The
holes at the bottom of the upper cylinder are just pin pricks, allowing
only the smallest of drops through. Western coffee filters use a medium
grind so the water goes through fast, but South Indian filter coffee is
finely ground so the water stays in contact longer. I have read that one
reason chicory is used is because it contributes to the clogging effect,
drawing out the brewing even longer, resulting in more mellow taste,
despite its own inherent bitterness.
The interesting question is where this method came
from. Coffee drinking in South India is not that old as A R
Venkatachalapathy reminds us in his wonderful essay "In Those Days
There Was No Coffee." That phrase, he explains, was used by mid-20th
century Tamil writers like Va. Ramaswamy Iyengar and U.V. Swaminatha Iyer
as a way to describe the period before 1910-15 which is when modernity as
defined by British-influenced innovations like coffee drinking really
started to make their way into middleclass Tamil households. In the 19th
century and before the standard drinks were neeragaram, fermented rice
water, or buttermilk, or just plain water, and he quotes a Tamil tract from
1914 which accuses coffee of marginalising all these drinks.
The parallel is with tea which was also mostly a drink produced for and
drunk by the British in the 19th century. It was only in the early 20th
century, after production levels had risen beyond the point where the
export market could absorb it all that plantation owners started looking at
the domestic Indian market. The Tea Market Expansion Board launched an
all-India campaign to promote tea drinking which, after initial failures,
succeeded spectacularly when they understood that to make it really
acceptable in India it had to be sold as a drink made with milk and sugar,
not drunk on its own.
Indians will evidently drink anything if it comes in milk, and coffee was
no exception. It was preferred in the South partly because it grew locally
in the Nilgiris, and partly because elitist Tamil Brahmins resisted the tea
campaign as too down-market, giving tea a working class (and Muslim)
reputation it has never entirely shrugged off in the South. Coffee was so
linked with Brahmins that the Dravidian ant-Brahmin leader Periyar launched
a campaign again coffee houses explicitly calling themselves as such, and
Venkatachalapathy notes that when the Tamil short story writer
Pudumaippithan wanted to call someone crazy he remarked: "You are a
chap who drinks tea at a Brahmin hotel."
But the knowledge of how to make coffee had to come
from somewhere and the answer must be the British. At the end of his
influential cookbook Culinary Jottings for Madras (1878) Colonel
Kenney-Herbert has three pages "On Coffee Making" and the method
he describes, from careful selection of beans, to slow roast to the type of
percolator used is almost identical to how filter coffee is made today. In
fact, he suggests going even slower by pouring in hot water in
teaspoonfuls: "The slower the water is added, the more thoroughly the
coffee will become soaked, and, the dripping being retarded, the essence
will be as strong as possible." This was made in advance to be added
to hot milk or water.
Other British writers took this even further. Flora
Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner in their Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook
(1888) even recommend steeping the coffee in cold water overnight, and only
then bringing it to boil before straining and storing for up to a week. But
predating all this was a manufactured product, the bottled coffee-chicory
essence called Camp Coffee first made by the Scottish company Paterson
& Sons in Glasgow in 1876. This was expressly sold as a product used by
the British in India since its label famously showed a British officer
enjoying a cup of coffee with his Sikh bearer behind him. Camp Coffee, or
imitations, was sold in both India and the UK and set a taste standard for
how the British felt coffee should taste.
Camp Coffee is still sold in the UK, though the
label has now been updated: the Sikh bearer is now an officer himself and
sits having coffee on equal terms with his British colleague. When this
change took place it caused a storm about political correctness gone too
far and might have helped drive away old customers. The product is now
really hard to find and I only got a bottle thanks to my friend Rachel
Dwyer who managed to find it online. The formulation includes a lot of
sugar so when you first taste it all you get intense syrupiness. But add it
to hot milk and this is diluted down and then I did get a hit of that
mellow yet intense taste of filter coffee.
Filter coffee fanatics might think it ridiculous to
link their brew to Camp Coffee, while regular coffee fanatics might see it
as conformation of all they find wrong about filter coffee. I have no proof
if any real link exists, and am not suggesting anyone gives up making
coffee any way they like in favour of this. But if someone were to make or
sell it in India it would certainly be worth trying as just another way for
non-fanatics like me to enjoy the many forms and flavours of coffee. Vikram Doctor CDET10920

Is
there really any shortcut to success? Well, if you ask experts, they agree
that certain steps do help you fast track your career in the early years

Young
executives Siddharth Kapoor and Natasha Singh have found ways to
turbo-charge their careers and put themselves on a fast track to the top,
and that too in the first two years of their careers. And these two are
amongst a large number of young professionals who are fast tracking their
careers.
So, is there really any shortcut to success?
"In the early days, you can commit more time, attention and energy to
your career. As life moves on, other dimensions of life demand more
attention and an employee cannot afford the same amount of time and focus.
As you grow, other priorities may take precedence," asserts Sudhanshu
Pandit, VP-HR, Symantec.
Similarly, Ronnie Dias, head human resources, Nalco
- An Ecolab Company expresses, "Taking these steps in the early years
help in building a strong foundation to your career. It will also ensure
that you have more knowledge and skills when compared to your peers. All
these steps form the building blocks of your career. If you have a strong
foundation, you will have a great career." On the other hand, Satya
Prabhakar, CEO, Sulekha.com feels
that there are no early years or late years. "Excellence is a habit.
At every point in life, there are challenges and there are competitors both
for individuals and companies. Life is at every point about swimming
upstream," he states.
A lot of examples can be seen in the corporate
world these days of young professionals who have carved success stories for
themselves in a very short span of time. So, what was the trick? Here's
what: The 5 ‘I’s: Prabhakar defines them as the 5 ‘I’s: First comes Intellect,
which is the intelligence to analyse and the creativity to construct. The
second is Initiative, which is the relentless hunger to want to do more,
achieve, succeed
and rise. The third is Industry, which is the capacity to work hard, to
focus on a task for a long period. The fourth is Interpersonal skills,
which is the ability to work with others for a whole greater than the
parts. And the fifth is Integrity, which is the character to behave the
same way whether someone is looking or not. Be a self-starter: "To fasttrack your career, show initiative
by constantly seeking and asking for opportunities and identifying
opportunities," suggests Pandit.

Have a coach/mentor: "Complement your confidence and ambition with the
wisdom of someone who may have previously succeeded in your path. They will
guide you about potential pitfalls and more importantly, introduce you to
their own network of contacts," asserts Pandit. Think through the process: "Ask relevant questions. Work beyond
your scope - don't fear to take on things you are not familiar with. Stand
up and ask for what's right. Take responsibility for all your action,
however bad the outcome. Respect your hierarchy and don't circumvent the
process - you will set a bad example for the rest of the team,"
asserts C.R. Rao, vice president - HR, Strategy & Admin, Sify
Technologies. Leverage strengths and network: "Understand why you are on a
fast-track and look at your career as an opportunity to develop your
inherent strengths. Engage with people in relevant positions within and
outside your organisation. Success is not just about what you know, but
whom you know and how you leverage your network," adds Pandit. Have patience and humility: "Sometimes success takes a bit longer than you expect. Patience
has great rewards. Don’t get carried away by success. Humility helps build
stronger relationships," advises Dias.

Tell sticky stories. Everything makes more sense with an illustration. Highlight
and example, illustrate an ideal customer avatar, or tell a specific instance
of a problem you had. Setting the context and the stage (that seems obvious to
you, the writer), makes it easier for people to understand the pain point, the
context, and the reason why you’re writing. When people can see your story--who
you are, where you come from, why you’re doing what you’re doing--it’s easier
for them to become a part of it.

Use the four-sentence, one-link rule: Keep your email to under four sentences (or five!). Focus on the pain point or problem you’re solving. Limit
yourself to only one link. If you have to, make that link a document.

Be responsive and reflective: Observe how others communicate and adapt your style to
meet them midway. Customize your communication by mirroring the style of a
received message. Does someone send short messages with formal addresses?
Respond in style.

Bookmark emails that you love with
Evernote. Use the vast number of emails in
front of you (and in your inbox) as clues to great messaging. Watch what emails
you open first and are most excited about. Create a few folders in your mailbox
system for great introductions, sample short messages, and thank-you notes that
you like. Keep these for future use if you’re ever in a bind. In any art,
there’s no need to reinvent the wheel--and paying attention to great writers
(and what we personally enjoy) is a great way to get started.

Email is our number one form of
communication, which means that everyone is a writer. The most powerful
thing you can do in both your personal and business life is learn how to write
well and tell great stories. Messages that persuade, content that converts, and
language that inspires action are critical for getting what you want.

According to Larry Huston, managing partner of consulting
firm 4INNO, future competitive advantage will depend on "innovation
networks" -- individuals and organizations outside a company that can help it solve problems and
find new ideas for creating growth. A senior fellow at Wharton's Mack
Center for Technological Innovation, Huston was vice president of knowledge and
innovation for many years at Procter & Gamble, where he was the architect
of its Connect + Develop program, an approach that helped extend the company's
innovation process to include 1.5 million people outside of P&G. Huston
spoke with Knowledge@Wharton about how innovation networks function, the ways
they can be nurtured, their potential downsides and the impact they will have
on how firms bring products to market. Huston is a faculty member in Wharton
Executive Education's upcoming program, "Full-Spectrum Innovation: Driving Organic Growth." An edited
transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: I understand that you
have been doing some work on innovation networks and arguing that these will be
a major disruptive change, affecting all companies in the future. Could you
explain that a little bit?

Huston: First of all, let's
define what innovation networks are. Innovation networks are people,
institutions and companies that are outside the firm -- they can also be inside
the firm, but for purposes here they're outside the firm. They are intellectual
assets that companies can link up with to solve problems and find ideas, while
beginning to think about those assets as an extended part of their organization
-- and therefore quickly create top-line growth and bring new things to the
marketplace.

From a competitive-advantage standpoint, yes, I think it's going to be a really
big deal. I don't believe we're at a tipping point yet, but I think, in the
future, the companies that identify those assets outside and begin to build
relationships with them have a real shot at building a competitive advantage
and preferential relationships.

Knowledge@Wharton: Could you give an example
of a company that has built an innovation network and is using it to its
advantage?

Huston: I think there are a
number of them. Procter & Gamble spent a lot of time defining the assets
outside that could help it in its various science areas and business areas and
set about developing, in different regions of the world, assets, hubs where we
could link into those. [It also] developed a proprietary network of individuals
who could contact others in different parts of the world.

So I think P&G has done that, and I think Boeing has done that with the
Dreamliner, particularly around building supply networks that are solving
problems. Microsoft has certainly done that to build out developer ecosystems,
as has IBM and others. But it's a relatively new idea to really think about how
you [can] build growth platforms utilizing ideas outside the company.

Knowledge@Wharton: It sounds like there
would be concerns about intellectual property when it comes to building these
kinds of networks. Is that the case?

Huston: Yes. There are concerns
and I think they're well-founded, in fact. There are good ways to handle them.
One of the major concerns is, if we go out and share what we're looking for on
the outside, it's going to tip our hand to our competition. So one way to
handle that might be to not clearly state what the problem is that you're
trying to solve.

You
don't talk about the end-product application, but you talk about the science
problem you're trying to solve, and you don't even put your company name on it
in some cases. You may do this anonymously, so that people are reading about a
physics problem or a baking problem and they have no idea what company it might
be coming from, or anything.

In some cases, however, you might want to deliberately put your name on it,
because people want to associate themselves with perhaps a big company that can
scale their idea. If you're not concerned about the competition seeing that,
you may deliberately want to put your name on it. My experience has been [that]
when you put your name on it, you get about twice the response rate.

The other issue is in sharing intellectual property like this outside,
particularly in regions of the world like China, where there aren't as many
intellectual property protections as there are, say, in the U.S. or Western
Europe. You do need to be careful in terms of what you share, so you need to
have good practices, good review points, good vetting by your business, by your
purchasing people, by your legal counsel; but with the proper precautions
there's not really a problem. It's just taking what you normally do and scaling
it up big, utilizing the Internet and the ability to globally distribute
e-mails and things like that.

Knowledge@Wharton: In offering the examples
of companies that do this, you referred to Procter & Gamble, Boeing and
Microsoft. Does that imply that this is only something for big companies, or
can smaller companies also build their own innovation networks?

Huston: No, I think small
companies can build them. In fact, a lot of these practices are based upon the
kinds of things that little companies do, who don't have a lot of resources.
They're always looking at what problems they have; they can't build a given
technology capacity, or they can't go and hire a group of people, and so
they're searching the patent literature, the technical literature, they're on
the Internet, trying to find people who have the ideas and [then] go knock on
their door.

So it's certainly something that small companies can do, and with the
development of the infrastructure outside of companies -- things like
InnoCentive, NineSigma, Alibaba in China, the innovation relay center system in
Europe -- there's a whole infrastructure of companies, some of them
government-sponsored, to help you get in touch with companies out there at
fairly low costs. So it's certainly something that small companies can do.

Knowledge@Wharton: I guess it's pretty clear
what the incentives might be for the company who's building a network like
this, but what are the incentives on the side of the people who participate in
the network or the other companies?

Huston: Thirty-five percent of
the patents in the world are now going to small companies. When most companies
built their R&D and innovation capacity, it wasn't long ago that a very
small proportion of the patents were going to these small entrepreneurs, these
small companies. The world has changed. In fact, many of the most innovative
people out there are in small companies. They were leaders. They were
technologists in big companies. They didn't like the environment in big
companies and so they went and became a small company.

And so they're out there, and they're doing highly innovative work, but what
they lack is market access, scale....

That's the kind of thing a Microsoft or a Procter & Gamble or Eli Lily or
companies like that can do. It's because they have scale, and the small company
has the agility and the entrepreneurship to think, "I've got to do this
well. I've got to do it at low cost." And, you know, they have some
advantages that big companies don't have.

So what you do is marry the scale advantages of the big company and sort of the
hungry attitude and agility of a small entrepreneur, and that's what you get.
You get this capability, and it can be done in that way.

Knowledge@Wharton: I think you've made a
very persuasive case about why companies might want to build innovation networks
and participate in them. What may not be very clear, though, is how they go
about it. Any thoughts on how a company could do this?

Huston: Well, yeah. One is get
very clear on what your strategic intent is. Are you doing it to solve a
specific problem? I might be a car company and I'm looking for a new battery
technology. Well, am I trying to solve a battery technology problem? Or, am I
like a Procter & Gamble, which fundamentally has said, "The
invent-it-yourself innovation model is broken, it's not sustainable. Therefore,
I've got to build a totally new capability. I've got to redefine my
organization as my ten thousand people in addition to the two million people
that are outside, and redefine myself as two million, ten thousand
people."

So, the very first step is to get very clear about why you're doing it, and
what your strategic intent is. And then begin to really design the network
around the strategic intent. Do you need just incremental problem solving? Do I
need to build idea nets? Do I need to build solution nets? Do I need cost
innovation networks? Am I looking for disruptive innovation? Do I need to reach
from one domain into another domain of knowledge outside of my industry where I
might find more disruptive innovation?

So, getting very clear on that, designing around that, and then really creating
an architecture of participation. How can you involve the outside world? I've
seen some very interesting things. For example, Toyota at Nagoya -- they have
supplier days. They have a briefing center, and anyone can theoretically knock
on the door and come in and pitch an idea for Toyota.

GE will hold events in China, say, in their appliance industry, and they'll
invite hundreds of suppliers in and say, "Here are our top problems. Can
you solve them?"
So, how do you create this architecture of participation, where the outside
world also can come in, and you can tap them? So there's a variety of different
things that you need to consider in terms of the design.

Knowledge@Wharton: Once you've got this
architecture worked out, how does one sort of get the ball rolling? What are
things to keep in mind? How do you get a conversation started?

Huston: Well the number-one thing
is, again, you have to really understand how you are going to use the networks
and what you are trying to do. So typically, the best way that networks work is
to create a brief, or a problem description that you're trying to solve. It
might be that you're trying to make a diaper that's flushable in the toilet
[for example].

From a problem like that, you begin to break it up into its components. It
might be something that has to hold liquid, yet dissolve in liquid. It's a very
difficult problem to solve.

You begin to develop what I call a "solutions playbook" for a problem
area. And from that solutions playbook, you have a number of problem
descriptions. Those get written up in a precise way in a two- or three-page
brief process. Then, based upon the brief, you develop a taxonomy of science
terms. And so in your brief, there may be 30 or 40 different science terms that
you want to express in three or four hundred ways, because different industries
would express it in a different way.

And then what you want to do is find people in the world utilizing search
engines or the Yellow Pages, and begin to distribute out to these people your
brief, so that you can make a connection and they can get back to you. That's a
transaction-based network. And so there's a transaction. I want something. I
send it out. I get something back. That's one way to go.

The other way to go with networks is to think about a relationship based model
-- [that is,] to identify small, medium, large companies that have strategic
technologies where I would develop relationships -- top-to-top relationships
between my firm and those firms. We basically co-invent, or collaborate
together to create the inventions.

The reality is, you can't support a lot of those because those are time
intensive. It takes a couple of years to get them off and going. They need to
understand you. You need to build trust in them back and forth.

So what you're really doing is, you're building a portfolio of relationships
with the outside world. Some of them will be transactions where you just send
things out and look for things to come back. Others will be a portfolio of
relationships that you very carefully have thought about and you leverage your
networks in that way.

So, it's this combination of thinking, and this is a foreign concept because
people think about their products that they want to take to market, what their
portfolio is, but they never think about the portfolio of relationships that
it's going to take and the demands of those relationships on the organization.
So you have to begin to think about, in this network global economy and
networks that we're talking about, the underlying capability and portfolio of
relationships that you want to build in order to build disruption and top line
growth in the business.

Knowledge@Wharton: When you source
innovation from within an organization, the sort of chain of command is
relatively clear. When you do it in a network, I can imagine that all kinds of
governance issues might come up. How should a company tackle those? What issues
come up?

Huston: Well, you're right. It's,
number one, trust based. You give me something, I give you something back. You
can't order people what to do, right? And in the end, your reputation is
important.

You want to become the preferred partner to the outside world because, look, if
I'm Procter & Gamble, for example, and I turn off a certain group of
innovators, the next competitor can pick up those relationships. So, in the end
we're in competition for building these relationships as time goes on. But I
think the important aspect of this is, really think through the
customer-supplier relationship and how do you become the preferred customer of
the external worlds.

Innovators, they want information. They want transparency. They want quick
speed and "get back to me quickly." They want a fair deal. And
frankly, the word-of-mouth and advocacy networks are very rapid. OK? Because
these people all move in the same circles. They all talk amongst each other as
we do. So, you have to really think through what is your innovation brand? What
do you stand for in terms of branding yourself in this global competition for
talent?

Knowledge@Wharton: Do companies tend to do
this informally as well? And do you think there are informal elements or
informal networks that companies might recognize as valuable?

Huston: Oh, there are. I absolutely
think so. Of course, the average scientist knows about 2,000 people. Their
rolodexes probably only have about 400 names in them. But they know about 2,000
people. But, they're the typical go-to people. You know that certainly exists,
but what you've got to do is find a way to connect up with those rolodexes
inside of a company. How do I find a way to connect up my rolodexes?

Also, there's tremendous lack of connectivity inside of companies. There were a
number of studies done on this. As soon as a scientist is more than 100 feet
away your office, you tend not to know people. You don't even know their name.
And I bet I could walk down the hall here and people who are probably only a
little more than 100 feet from you, you would not know their names. It happened
to me in my office. It happens to all of us. We come in and out and we're busy.
So we're as isolated inside our companies as we are outside.

So there's a major opportunity to utilize these networking tools and approaches
inside amongst ourselves with our trusted suppliers who have huge talent bases
and then with people outside who really have no reason to have a relationship
with us other than the fact that we knock on their door and say, "Hey, we
think you're interesting and you might have something. In what way can we
create value for our consumers?"

Knowledge@Wharton: We've talked quite a bit
about the value of participating in the networks. What are some of the risks or
the disadvantages?

Huston: Well, there are a couple
of them. Again, if you're not smart, you give away things from an intellectual
property standpoint. You have to be very smart about deal making because very
often, it's like the slot machine; the dollar wheels are spinning immediately.
So, most scientists are not very good in terms of talking money and they give
away way too much information. They're not exactly the people that you want
negotiating your next car or your next house price; we'll say it that way. Now
some are, of course. So I think you have to be very careful about having the
wrong skilled people getting involved in deal discussions. I mean, that's an
issue. The IP certainly is an issue.

The other one is that if you're not smart, the world is so big and you can
throw requests out there and you'll just be inundated with responses. So you
have to be very careful to match your absorptive capacity with the outside
world. The ideal network is if you have three problems, three outside people
right? This is because you want to contact somebody, do a deal and get it into
the market. The fact that we have to build networks with many people is because
we can't easily get to people. As a result, you tend to throw your briefs out
and talk to a lot of people. But, you know things come home to roost at some
point and everybody is knocking on your door and you're inundated. So,
designing the network to match your absorptive capacity is a key issue.